CASE STUDY: Canadian Blood Services

IT Service Automation Enables Canada toEnsure a Safe Blood Supply

Profile:Manages a safe, secure, and cost-effective blood system.

Location:
Ottawa, Canada

Industry:
Healthcare

Website:www.blood.caSolutions:®

§ Ivanti Service Manager§ Ivanti Incident Management, Service Request, Self

Service, Service Catalog, Problem Management,Change Management, Release Management, Service
Level Management, and Survey

Benefits to Canadian Blood Services:§ Reduced outages in environment by 70%§ Achieved a change success rate of 95%§ Reduced call volumes by 50%§ Can create new virtual machines for the specificenvironment in hours, not weeks

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When illness or trauma strikes, a person’s life
may depend on ready access to a bloodtransfusion. Across Canada, patients rely on
Canadian Blood Services to manage a safe,
secure, and cost-effective blood system. It also
operates a stem cell and marrow network, cord
blood bank, and national patient registries fororgan donation and transplantation.

IT at the Speed of Life
“Four years ago, we had an issue,” recalls Steve Aiston,Senior Program Manager for IT at Canadian Blood Services.
“Many of our IT service processes were not achieving theresults we needed or we lacked an appropriate process.”
When it comes to people, process, and technology, Aiston
says, “we knew we had good people but we were missing
sufficient IT service management automation, and weneeded new and better processes.”
Many IT processes were manual, being managed throughdatabases, spreadsheets, and paper. “We were a paperdriven organization,” says Aiston. “That creates atremendous constraint when you deal at the speed of IT.”IT service automation was key to delivering quality IT
services more efficiently. “We needed a system thatdelivered information about operations quickly to the rightpeople to allow them to make informed decisions andcommunicate with the people who need to execute thework,” he says.
The IT team set out to find an enterprise-class service®
management platform. Beyond robust support for ITIL
principles, IT wanted a solution with strong workflow andself-service capabilities to increase efficiency. As a point ofqualification, the chosen solution needed to be able toautomate a critical intake process for SAP: streamlining thecoordination of the initial request, validating the roles,coordinating the training, and creating the account access.
“It was a complex process, and that was our high-watermark,” says Aiston.

CASE STUDY: Canadian Blood Services

A Solid Foundation
After a formal RFP, Canadian Blood Services chose IvantiService Manager and deployed it in the cloud. “We want tobe experts in using an IT service management system, but
running the system is best handled by the industry expertsthat designed it,” says Aiston.
Canadian Blood Services has taken a measured rollout ofits IT service management system, beginning with IncidentManagement, Service Request, Self Service, Service
Catalog, Problem Management, and then building on thatfoundation with Change Management, Release
Management, Survey, and Service Level Management.
“We have progressively enabled IT service management
automation and new processes in a bottom-to-top
approach,” says Aiston. “Service Manager allowed us toentrench each forward step in our operation procedures andbuild on each process to become a more mature IT shop
and a much more effective service provider to the business.”

Cultivating Success
The results are impressive. Ralph Michaelis, CIO of
Canadian Blood Services, says, “Ivanti and our IT Service
Management program at Canadian Blood Services has hada significant impact on IT operations. Our service
management implementation is providing us the visibility,data, and agility we need to transform the business of IT.”As an example, with ITIL processes supported by theService Manager platform, Canadian Blood Services
reduced its outage rate by 70%. Its change success rate
improved from around 75% to 95%.
“Service Manager’s strength is its well-thought-out, ITILbased configuration,” says Aiston. Each IT team has its own
specialty, but increasingly IT services rely on integrated
technologies. “Service Manager provides the ability toreintegrate service support even though it may spandifferent teams, each providing a different component of aparticular service,” he says.
IT created or improved dozens of processes with Service
Manager. The server request process is one example. It’s ahighly-controlled process that requires coordination between
multiple teams and multiple validation checks. In the past,
the routing of requests to create a server virtual machine
took two weeks to complete. Now, with an automatedservice request workflow, request handling is completed in

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about two hours. “Multiply that type of improvement bydozens of processes, and you can understand how much
improvement we’ve undergone,” says Aiston.
With the power of ITIL processes and systems evident in
day-to-day operations, the adoption of Service Manager hasbeen swift. “Uptake has been very good,” says Aiston. “Withnew automation and optimized processes available, it’s
obvious to folks that the new way is faster, more efficient,and less of a struggle.”“Service Manager allowed us to entrench eachforward step in our operation procedures andbuild on each process to become a more mature
IT shop and a much more effective service
provider to the business.”
Steve Aiston, Senior Program Manager, ITSelf Service Drives Efficiency
Empowering employees to use self service has cut servicedesk call volumes in half, and moved a third of intake to theweb. The shift was organic. “The ease with which ourbusiness took to the web as a means of request submission
is a testament to Service Manager,” says Aiston.
Keith Colwell, Director of Client Delivery, says, “Improving
our IT services processes has allowed us to relieve thepressure on the service desk. We were being hit with a large
number of outages and incidents due to ourineffective processes. The changes allowed the service
desk to provide better service to users as well as being able
to redirect funding into other strategic areas of our businesslike our Web and mobile programs, which brings in more
donors. There’s a definite link between improving our IT
operations and satisfying the mission of the organization.
We were also able to give more clarity and flexibility to theanalysts on the desk that allowed working from home on theonline requests, as well as being able to complement ourstrategy of building their ITIL skill set.”Better Visibility into IT Operations
Ivanti Service Manager improved visibility into operational
metrics, so IT can better align its resources with theorganization’s priorities. In the past, IT directors requested
reporting from a separate business-intelligence platform.

CASE STUDY: Canadian Blood Services

Now, they can immediately see the information that mattersmost. “With the dashboards in Service Manager, thedirectors have unprecedented, real-time visibility intooperations,” says Aiston. “It’s been a big win.”

Continuous Service Improvement
IT continues to drive service quality. IT is advancing thechange management process by creating a data model thatenhances the architectural information in the CMDB toprovide visibility from individual components all the way
through to the business service.
“There’s going to be a transformation in IT when people
understand that this information is available to them as partof the change process,” he says. That information will freeup IT experts who provide insight into potential issues
during changes today. “We’ll back off our reliance on people
and rely on technical information and the histories of ourinfrastructure items to know which ones are serving us welland which ones aren’t,” says Aiston.
Another current focus is service level management, whichallows IT to set expectations for service requests. “It ties us
to the business more tightly, and we can see whether weare meeting those targets,” he says.

“That’s why Service Manager was the right system
for us. Service Manager has a good understanding of
the inherent operations and doesn’t have a lot ofclutter around ITIL. It was just the right amount.”
Steve Aiston, Program Manager, IT

Deep Expertise and a Strong Partnership
Aiston and his team lead the ITIL transformation at
Canadian Blood Services, and also have relied on Kifinti forexpert guidance. Aiston and his team did the heavy lifting ofdesign and deployment. “We wanted to build up our own
strength and understanding of Service Manager and handle
the day-to-day work ourselves, and then bring in Kifinti forthe more complex work,” says Aiston.
“What’s amazing is the continual service improvement that
Canadian Blood Services has embarked on and how it has
taken full advantage of its investment in Service Manager,”says Paul Kelsey, service consultant at Kifinti. “CanadianBlood Services is in the top tier of ITSM maturity.”www.ivanti.com

Just the Right Amount of Process
Aiston has learned that when it comes to ITIL, you need justthe right amount. “There’s a tendency to skim the surface
with ITIL, which isn’t very effective – or people go to theother extreme and go whole-hog,” says Aiston. “When ITIL
implementations get in trouble, it’s often because they losttrack of ITIL’s operational value and they do things strictly
for what looks like good ITIL reasons.
“When that happens, people lose interest in the process,” hecontinues. “The returns diminish when you overburden aprocess with information. People stop being able to makethe right decisions at the right time.
“That’s why Service Manager was the right system for us,”
Aiston concludes. “Service Manager has a goodunderstanding of the inherent operations and doesn’t have a
lot of clutter around ITIL. It was just the right amount.”

About Kifinti
Kifinti, which means “How are you?” in Maltese, is focusedentirely on helping deliver more effective service through theimplementation of best practices focused around service,asset, endpoint, and identity management. Our expertise ishelping organizations transform the organizational
processes and is based on adopting industry best practices
like ITIL, COBIT, and ISO 9000, implementing technology
solutions to support those processes. Our consultants, ourmethodology, our team, and our strategy have all beenchosen in support of this.

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